Elegiac Negotiations: Neville Dawes through Kwame Dawes’s Eyes

“It is evident,” writes Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto, “that the combination of Kwame Dawes’s bicontinental heritage and love for his father and family has bestowed an elegiac temperament upon his work.” The following essay meditates on the son’s elegiac negotiations taking place in Dawes’s work.

I: Death and Fear

Kwame Dawes (b. 1962) has built an impeccable reputation as a poet, author, playwright, professor of literature, and co-curator of the highly influential African Poetry Book Fund. This fund has published almost every recognizable African poet working today since it was launched over a decade ago in 2012. Away from his curatorial reputation, Dawes is a consummate poet of contemplation and sage understanding of the scrim and scram of contemporary Black life as it is. In a career that has spanned over thirty years, he has published multiple works, including poetry collections, novels, and memoirs. 

However, the crux of his poetry is its dwelling on elegiac negotiations of familial grief. Numerous poems broadly explore questions of fatherhood. One specific poem in Narrative Magazine, “The Forgettable Life,” about his father-in-law began thus: “I do wonder how it’s inside of him to live unknown or unknowable.” The poem draws parallels, wittingly or unwittingly, between his wife’s father and his father. It chronicles the intertwined histories of Caribbean lives—the sameness, the similarity if you will—of the journeys and experiences of Caribbean families. But if these lives are unmemorable, why would Dawes label it “forgettable”? Perhaps he only searches for that forgettable quality, that which is known:

I do think of how
we live out these complete lives unseen
by those who should know, and how at death,
the lasting scent of things fades with us
inside tidy compartments, the manageable, the compact
world we try to keep as a container of chaos
that even we do not think to keep.

Seeking to know the “unknown” and “the unknowable” seems to be the compass that guides Dawes’s explorations of his father’s life (and the unknown and the unknowable are clearly life and death). Major parts of his poetry not only investigate and interrogate his father’s life, but through Dawe’s use of language we often feel that this fixation with fatherhood translates directly to self-examination—that is, painstaking picking at his own life, which is partly via the life of the marginally itinerant father.

Dawes’s father, Neville Dawes (1926–1984), was born in Warri, Nigeria, to Jamaican parents who were Baptist missionaries. Neville spent his formative years in Jamaica, where his parents had returned when he was three years old. He studied English at Oriel College, Oxford, and later taught English at the University of Ghana. While there, he married a Ghanaian woman, Sophia, and in 1962. Throughout his lifetime, Neville built a strong reputation as a notable Caribbean writer with an emphasis on novels and poetry. His son Kwame’s double African and Caribbean heritage heavily influences his work. But the crucial link is his father’s own itinerary and connections to Africa, a place where myth and modernity—the unknowable and the knowable—seem to coexist; the same countenance is very present in Caribbean culture. In his memoir, Far from Plymouth Rock (2007), Dawes writes of a strange incident that happened upon his father’s death, which he felt was part of a significantly haunting feeling he experienced while living in Kingston, Jamaica:

The hauntings were strangely intense when my father died. Like the giant moth that took up residence in my office the day after his death. This moth would not leave, no matter what I did. I used a broom and brushed it out of the room. I shut the door and felt satisfied that it was gone. The next morning, it would be in the corner again. It had flown in through the louvers over the door. I could not close the louvers. I was tempted to kill the thing, but a friend warned me against that. He said that he was quite clearly my father coming to visit me for a while before his journey home. I did not buy this, but I found a strange attraction in the notion. I found that the presence of the moth brought me some peace of mind, and I was comforted by the myth. (53)

Dawes goes into greater detail throughout the book, attempting to make sense of this myth. Since he does not see himself as a superstitious person, he considers it a natural result of his grief over his father. Yet he places a degree of importance on it as he contemplates the meaning of death, the feeling of death and loss. The reason for this is clearly his sentimental attachment to his father’s memory and his dual African heritage, that of Ghana in Africa and Jamaica in the Caribbean archipelago. The view of death in these two cultures sitting on opposite sides of the Atlantic privileges the unknown that exists outside the realm of human life; the act of mourning is ritualized in a culture of meanings and layers of dread. Thus, death and how mourning happens is culture-specific. 

Dawes is fully aware of this when he admits that “death goes beyond the mere hurting of the heart. It is grounded in the landscape” (55). Deaths in Ghana and Jamaica keenly drew him into a stronger connection with both places. From here, Dawes’s elegiac investigation of his own strategic response to his father’s death begins to make sense to us. It lies completely in his decision to reside and pursue his career in America rather than complete his residency in Ghana or Jamaica. America was a country his father exercised a deep distrust for and avoided any interactions with during his lifetime, so the idea that we ultimately get from Dawes’s writing about his father is the son’s understated sense of his own guilt and betrayal of his father’s lifelong stance.

II: The Depth of a Poet’s Elegies

A poet acts out his grief with poetry; a poet performs mourning likewise. Dawes’s poetry is heavily punctuated by references to his father. What we observe is that a poet always finds a way to negotiate connections, and here it is the connection both as a father-son relationship and between the older writer and the younger one. Neville Dawes had written a poem, “Acceptance,” dedicated to his wife, Kwame Dawes’s mother. (“Acceptance” is also the roving, detailed tribute Dawes’s father-in-law could have written for his own wife. We get that picture from “The Forgettable Life.”) Dawes had been especially moved by that poem—and he considers it, it seems, the quintessence of spousal grief. The second section of his book of poetry Resisting the Anomie (1995) is dedicated as a response (typical of the “after . . .” poems subgenre) to that earlier poem by his father.

A poet acts out his grief with poetry; a poet performs mourning likewise.

“After ‘Acceptance,’” the first poem in the second section of the aforementioned book, picks up where his father’s poem stopped, but it nicks a particular image from the earlier poem, “wrinkled hands,” used by his father to refer to the love sustained in dying moments. In Dawes’s after-poem, he gives us a moving autobiographical picture of growing up in the shadow of his father: “Crafting your dreams / from the tattered books / teacher Dawes crammed / onto his shelves” (41). From here, Dawes paints images of childhood bliss, road trips taken on the coastal roads of Jamaica, the paradisiacal idyll of the island. It seems that as the poem moves further and further in, we come to appreciate the beauty of a quintessentially middle-class Caribbean household and the cultural mores that cocoon it.

And the mores continue to prevail as he writes around the departed presences of his parents: “Maybe your ghosts hover above the house at nights . . . / You return morose, having done your part of touching the / living before dawn” (45). Recall that Dawes denies he was superstitious in his memoir, but here he seems to be participating in a form of myth-making, an enshrinement, with his parents’ ghosts. Interestingly, he uses strategic prepositions and verbs such as “hover,” “return,” “touching,” as though his longing is to make their presence concrete. It seems that Dawes is not just interrogating his memories from their memory and from materials his father left; he also seems to be extending it. From his memory of the idyllic landscape of his childhood, he writes in the poem: “I can see her bandannaed there / sharp calico against the hill’s grey / her wrinkled hands outstretched, trembling / her eyes glowing” (44). In another section of the same poem, he writes: “I praise these things / freed by her wrinkled hands” (46). All emphasis here is on the phrase “wrinkled hands.” The wrinkled hands of a woman near death or the wrinkled hands of time’s atrophy on the human skin. Whichever it is, we know that a wrinkle is a detail of aging and that its repetition is the poet’s negotiation of not just his father’s poetic elegy to his deceased wife but also his own seeking to understand death and its actions on his family.

In his autobiographical collection Impossible Flying (2006), Dawes again views his father under the microscope. In the poem “Pre-Mortem,” he dwells on the vibrancy of his father’s life before death while hovering around the image of Sturge Town, where his father had grown up. From his view, this being one of the earliest mentions of this town in his poetry, it is a place that is typical of Jamaica—the music, the food, the air. But it is a place that had formed his father and lends itself to a better understanding of what can be known about him. It is this memory of Sturge Town that he revisits when seeking an understanding, which he seems to find in degrees through his father’s fraternal relations: “I know / that in this I have found the mystery of his calm / acceptance when you died those months / later, in another season, on another familiar night” (34).

Dawes’s most recent collection, Sturge Town (2024), coalesces all the ancestral connections of the Dawes family in Jamaica into a kind of genealogy of movements. The Dawes family originated in Sturge Town in St. Ann’s Parish, Jamaica. The town was one of the earliest free villages in the country in the aftermath of slavery and dates back to 1839. Dawes uses the historical memories of the family home in Sturge Town as a metaphor in the narrative linking his origins back to Africa, Europe, and now America. He places his story as his family, narrowing down on his life and his strivings, but above all, he makes myth out of the familial reality, both literal (as in death) and metaphorical (as in journeys).

This collection primarily focuses on his family, so some of the poems in this masterly work touch on his father. The first poem we encounter here on this subject is “Welsh,” addressed directly to his father. Again, this poem is like a memory, likely a story told by his father. Sometime in 1949, Neville Dawes—a Black man, needless to say—had been mistaken in a pub as a fellow Welshman by a group of Welsh coal miners whose white skin had become blackened by coal:

the regulars
were so coal-stained they called
themselves niggers, they
thought a man who could play
the piano like you, drink like you,
run a hundred yards like you,
and fill your pipe with aroma
like you, had to be at least
as good as the worst Welshman (22)

It is an interesting bit of wry humor and yet another footnote of unveiling who Dawes Sr. was and why his son now grieves him through the multiple interfaces of poetry. But it appears that the real grief here is for the principles of family values that the elder had taught the younger.

Another story, in the poem “A Year,” goes back to 1962 when Dawes was born. It is curious how the poet speculates on the reactions to his birth. Though there are real indications here that this is still part of the intergenerational legends that are told in most families—when you were born in so and so, such and such happened—but here we are seeing Dawes’s father in full view. How does a man react when a son is born to him? As it happens, this was a writer fathering a would-be writer. What’s interesting here is the mundane struggle of survival:

so, 1962 was a year of great moment:
my father had a second son, had a book
doing the rounds of reviews,
was as much a writer as he would
ever be. It was his best moment
despite the doldrums he felt trapped in,
despite his impatience for glory
(he would not know this for years). (38)

Dawes sees himself somewhat as a prodigal who had abandoned his father’s values in search of America.

But there are hints of promises and guilt over failed promises. This is what we glean from the eponymous poem, “Sturge Town,” As the ancient family home in the ancient Sturge had gone to ruins, Dawes makes a metaphorical connection between that abandonment and his own life. He sees himself somewhat as a prodigal who had abandoned his father’s values in search of America. And still, he feels that he is remedying that abandonment in the present by keeping memory alive in his own way:

For too long I spoke of return, a kind
of prodigal fantasy, although, face
set against the sun, I had abandoned
the waywardness of the failed son. 
My father is long dead, and I was
faithful to the last. Still, postcolonial
that I am, I built my own myth
of departure, set aside the romance
of the exile for the pragmatics
of family and mission. (32)

In Sturge Town, Dawes’s focus on fatherhood comes full circle: the focus shifts from his father to himself at some point. It seems like the transition of the reins of relevance from one generation to the other, and he acknowledges this always with a certain poignancy, even sadness. The poem “No Joy’s Prophet” takes that reflective pose, a contemplation of time. He muses on how far he has come from his father and how his own children have moved on from him to become their own fathers and parents: “I know I am not joy’s prophet, just a father / recounting moons passed, / nervous that every word / I say will annoy them, indolent to my warnings” (49). It is a melancholy observation: “Today my children, / their lot once mine — with rent, bills, infants, / new wife — have said farewell to youth” (49). For Dawes, his father has become part of the family legend as well as his own symbol of fatherhood—his overriding interest is in self-reflection. That is, it is also about himself. Dawes’s elegies therefore range from dispatches of grief to full-blown philosophical questions about death, life, time, movement, and change.

III: Later Locations

Taken together, a complete autobiography of his father could be fashioned out of Dawes’s works. It is a fixation attached to strong family connections, but it is also a fixation that a younger writer may have for an elder who has immensely influenced him. Dawes has unceasingly negotiated his life in his poetry; a good part of that oeuvre also interrogates his father’s experiences. There are too many stories told about the older man in these works, so we necessarily find most references touching back to the father or at least the family.

Dawes has unceasingly negotiated his life in his poetry; a good part of that oeuvre also interrogates his father’s experiences.

Dawes’s 2001 collection, Midland, co-opts the Black experience into his father’s experience. More Black experiences, both as a father and being fathered, are found not in only Midland but also in Far from Plymouth Rock. These experiences offer prismatic views of what Dawes and Dawes’s father were, or were not, physically and mentally. The poem “Ska Memory,” dedicated to his father, excavates another memory—a vortex of images, streets, history, and music—but it is yet another instance of a memory in which the father teaches his son the meaning of life, clichéd as that may be. Several poems find their strength in the mythmaking of a combination of urban life and family. Poems here seem to come from the same place whence the memoir Far from Plymouth Rock emerged: the American experience, an influence that would become important in Dawes’s poetry.

The idea of “Midland” implies a location somewhere, and for the poet who is of course no longer resident in Jamaica or even Ghana, it his maternal country, where he never really lived for long. In direct terms, the Midland is really a metaphor for midlife. The poet is coming to a long-overdue understanding of his own life as he approaches middle age. He has come into his own and is also trying to understand what it is for him to be in America (in South Carolina at that point). A great many things bother him, among them racism: “I have returned to South Carolina . . . on whose southern banks New World / Kurtzes rave among the natives” (45).

In the collection Nebraska, from 2019, Dawes chronicles another aspect of the American experience. Attaining status and becoming a noted mentor of poetry himself comes with its own reflections. With this in mind, he begins the first poem thus: “Now that I have my thorn in the flesh / I can write epistles, holy writs” (3). The overriding image here is of winter, the literal winter as well as the winter of life, in which the poet finds himself exercising more restraint and becoming more circumspect. But winter also evokes dreariness. And here the poet comes again to dwell on death and grief; thus the silent “death” weather of one place brings familiar memories. To point to one poem, “The Immigrant Contemplates Death” seems too consumed by morbidity. But we see it is once again Jamaica and Neville Dawes, and the Dawes’s lineages, that are gone: “This / is what I can say of exile; / a body like me has lost track / of the narrative of mortality,” he writes (7). And finally this wisdom and realization:

I was born
in a city that turned into
a village within hearing
distance, and the deep red
the soil of Accra knows it is
always prepared for the deep
warmth of cankering bodies,
for the spirits that treat
the trees and roads as temporary
dwellings before the teeming
underneath of performance. In Kingston,
I considered death each day,
its friendship with the living
and we die as if the body
was made for this. (7)

It is evident that the combination of the poet’s bicontinental heritage and love for his father and family has bestowed an elegiac temperament upon his work. His poems, indeed his writing, will always muse about death, grieve as well as philosophize it, for as humans we lose and the earth gains with the demise of each human flesh, the bodies of people we love. It is our fate; as Dawes puts it: “we die as if the body was made for this” (8). 

Dawes’s writing will always muse about death, grieve as well as philosophize it, for as humans we lose and the earth gains with the demise of each human flesh.

By the end, this end, we have a picture of Neville Dawes through Kwame Dawes’s eyes, a remarkable teacher, writer, administrator, music man, friend, family man, a man in love with his wife, in love with life, a certain Christian, a possible socialist, a sensible man, and a mentor to his sons and daughters. Having all these qualities, it is easy to see why Dawes dwells always on his memory, why he painstakingly negotiates life through his memories, and by so doing make sense of his own peculiar grief. Or, we can say, writing it all down in his poetry is his own form of grieving.

Lincoln, Nebraska